Director views inmate suicides as failures; new steps being taken

Some people were glad - or at least not sorry - when Ariel Castro committed suicide.

Alan Johnson, The Columbus Dispatch

Some people were glad — or at least not sorry — when Ariel Castro committed suicide.

As evidenced on social media and comments on news stories, the outrage and anger aimed at the Cleveland man who kidnapped three young women and held them captive for up to 10 years meant many Ohioans couldn’t muster much sympathy when Castro was found hanging from a window hinge Sept. 3 in his cell at the Orient Correctional Institution.

Ohio prisons director Gary Mohr was not among them.

He sees Castro’s suicide, and the one by Billy Slagle on Death Row a month earlier, as failures of the system he oversees.

“I accept responsibility,” he said in an interview. “They may have done despicable things, but this person was sent to our custody. We are not the judge and jury on life.”

Prisons officials are taking new steps to prevent suicides: using “safe cells,” disposable paper uniforms, soft food and paper eating utensils for inmates on suicide watch; spot-checking video to make sure corrections officers are making rounds; training employees to be watchful for signs that inmates might be suicidal; and reviewing mental-health assessments done when inmates enter the system.

But Mohr cautioned that no amount of vigilance, precautions and staff attention will stop all inmates who are determined to take their own lives.

“When people become hopeless, they are a danger to themselves and others,” he said.

In response to the high-profile suicides, Mohr hired a national expert, Dr. Lindsay M. Hayes of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, to come to Ohio next month to review the system.

Mohr, a former prison warden, has made late-night calls to family members informing them of a suicide and dealt with staff members traumatized by sudden death on their watch. He ordered four corrections officers placed on administrative leave after the Castro and Slagle suicides.

The suicide rate in Ohio prisons of 12 per 100,000 inmates is below the national average of 16 per 100,000, a recent Correctional Institution Inspection Committee report said.

There were 88 suicides in state prisons from 2000 to present and 896 attempted suicides since 2004, including 42 this year, the report showed. The average prisoner who committed suicide was a 34-year-old man. About half were on the prison mental-health caseload and half were not.

Most inmates who take their own lives generally do so in either in the first year of incarceration or after 10 years or more, the report said.

Stuart Hudson, chief of the state prison health-care office, said additional steps being taken by prison officials include suicide-awareness training for new employees, annual training for all employees, and special instruction for employees working in mental-health units; placing more officers in housing units “as eyes and ears” to identify when inmates are acting abnormally; and adjusting the timing of the 72-hour suicide watch on inmates before an execution.

Officials with the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, the union representing prison employees, charge that staff reductions have made prisons more dangerous and give inmates more opportunity to commit suicide without interference.

Mohr disagrees.

“Would more staff have prevented it? I don’t believe that’s the cause for the loss of life. It’s the inmate making the choice that is the biggest contributor.”